Impressive Lineup for OASIS Adoption Forum

["Patrick Gannon" <patrick.gannon@oasis-open.org>]

OASIS members,

As the OASIS Adoption Forum nears, I wanted to take a moment to encourage
you all to attend this annual European meeting of Consortium members and
their guests. The event will be held in London, 17 October, with a special,
half-day OpenDocument and DITA Focus on Tuesday, 18 October. 

The OASIS Adoption Forum provides an opportunity for users, government
agencies, researchers, and developers to explore what open standards mean
for today's e-government, e-health, and e-commerce communities. The event
offers an ideal opportunity for active OASIS participants--as well as those
who may not be involved in the day-to-day development of standards--to
understand the trends, the status, and the actual business cases that drive
our work.

The intimate scale and one-track program of the Forum will deliver ample
opportunities for sharing ideas, promoting your work, learning about related
efforts, and educating others. We'll examine the benefits offered by
specifications such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language
(WSBPEL) and the Election Markup Language (EML). Presentations from HM
Revenue & Customs on standards and taxation, from the Netherlands Ministry
of Finance on best practices for e-government, and from the Norwegian
Insurance Administration on its ebXML-based national e-health infrastructure
will also be featured.

Ovum analyst, David Mitchell, will provide the keynote address on Open
Standards and Open Source. He'll discuss why users need to look beyond
'open' and play an active role in ensuring that the standards being
developed today meet their needs for interoperability. If your organisation
is affected by the open source movement, the OASIS Adoption Forum presents
an ideal opportunity to further this important dialogue and gain greater
understanding of the divergence and commonalities at play.

A panel addressing how standards organisations can coordinate efforts to
promote real interoperability will also be featured. Leaders from Europe's
most influential standards bodies including CEN/ISSS, GS1, ICTSB, and ITU
will join OASIS  to discuss how their groups are responding to user outcry
for more cooperation in the standards development arena.

As I mentioned, we've added an extra half-day of content focused on two
newly approved OASIS Standards, OpenDocument and the Darwin Information
Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA builds content reuse into the authoring
process for document creation and management. OpenDocument provides a
royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text,
spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

You may be aware that the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently
proposed a requirement for all state office documents and presentations to
be output in a format that is compliant with the OpenDocument OASIS
Standard, and many European governments are considering similar policies. In
London, we'll examine how companies and organisations can migrate to the
OpenDocument format. We'll also discuss the ways industry sectors, such as
pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and telecommunications, can standardise on
DITA subject-matter vocabularies within their communities.

Attendance at the Adoption Forum is open to all, and OASIS members are
eligible for a substantial discount. Forum attendees may participate in the
OpenDocument and DITA Focus at no additional cost. Registration for the
Focus alone, which will be held from 9:00 am until noon on Tuesday, 18
October, is also available. 

OASIS Adoption Forum meeting costs are partially offset by the generous
support of OASIS Foundational Sponsors, BEA Systems, Innodata Isogen, SAP,
and Sun Microsystems, and by event sponsors, HP, IBM, and Xenos. The
OpenDocument and DITA Focus is sponsored by IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Eduardo Gutentag, Chairman of the Board, and I will be attending this event
and look forward to greeting you personally.  This is also a great
opportunity for you to share your views on the future of OASIS directly with
the organization's leaders.

I urge you all to consider attending this meeting, and invite your
colleagues and customers to join us. Details and online registration are at
http://www.oasis-open.org/events/adoption_forum_2005/.

Regards,

Patrick Gannon
President and CEO
OASIS